


The Tree

by foxjar



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Mystery, Supernatural Elements, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 04:57:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21155984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxjar/pseuds/foxjar
Summary: Lukas finds a strange tree on his grandparents' farm.





	The Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shoulder_Devil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shoulder_Devil/gifts).

When Lukas was young, he fell out of a tree on his grandparents' farm. It was an apple tree, one of many strewn out in the orchard, and he had climbed it a dozen times before then. The branches were kept neat and trim, and when he crawled up to the highest point of the tree, he could see all the way to the little farmhouse.

His fall resulted in a fractured arm, and it was this incident that made him wary of trees. He's never climbed one again, no matter how beautiful and tempting the view might have been. It's all just a memory now, logged so far back that it's fogged over with a biased melancholy.

Now that he's a teenager, he doesn't venture out quite as far whenever he and his mother visit the farm. With age, it's somehow lost his charm, and because his mother throws a fit whenever he says he doesn't want to tag along for the trip, it's become an agonizing chore. He'd rather be doing anything else: sleeping, staring at the ceiling, or even his chemistry homework.

It isn't until nighttime that he sees the tree. His mother and grandparents have chattered their way through the evening, and instead of driving home on the old country roads this late, his mother decides they'll be staying the night. She doesn't ask Lukas his opinion, and even if he had spoken up, she wouldn't have listened to what he wanted.

People, he's learned, tend to just be like that sometimes — not caring who they might be inconveniencing.

He sleeps alone up in the attic while everyone else rests soundly on the ground floor. It's where his mother had lived as a child, and she insisted that he would be fine — just a few bats, is all. Sometimes they manage to slip in through the woodwork of the old farmhouse, thunking along the walls as they try to find their way back out to freedom.

It isn't the bats that unnerve him. It's the tree he can see through the window, just beyond the orchard he played in when he was younger. The tree has an odd glow to it, encased in moonlight as if sucking up the very energy of the sky. Behind the orchard is a large expanse of grass for the cows to graze and beyond that are the woods.

_So why would a tree be right there? Before the woods?_

Although Lukas thinks about it all through the night, tossing and turning in the small, chilly attic, the tree has escaped his thoughts by morning. He sits down for breakfast with his family, and within a few hours, he and his mother are in the car, heading home.

* * *

It isn't until their next visit months later that he sees it again as they pull up the gravel driveway and up to the farmhouse. He decides to make the trek out past the orchard once he's able to escape his grandparents' hugs and incessant questions about his high school adventures, to which his answers never change.

_School is fine. But boring._

The tree is larger than he remembered seeing from his window all those months ago. Its bark is dark and more black than brown, giving it a washed-out look. Although the trunk is thick, the branches are thin and gnarled, winding around each other as well as the tree itself.

One of the strangest parts about the tree is that it has no leaves of any kind, as if devoid of life, but it has fruit hanging from its branches. It's of various shapes and sizes, some smaller while others are about the length of his arm.

If he climbed the tree, he would be able to see the fruit better. From where he's standing, he can tell that it's an odd, fleshy sort of color, and although the fruit looks about ready to fall, making the branches droop with their weight, they remain suspended in midair. He remembers his fall as a child, though, and he shakes his head at the tree as if it was the tree itself trying to tempt him up into its branches.

When he asks his grandmother about it at lunch, she has no idea what he's talking about. They, along with Lukas' mother, are all sitting at the small dining table by the front door, eating sandwiches made with sliced vegetables from the garden.

"You'll have to ask your grandpa about that," she says. Her domain consists of the area around the house: the fish pond along with the small garden of herbs and vegetables.

But even when his grandfather returns from his farmwork to join them for lunch, wind howling outside as the front door protests at being closed, he doesn't know what tree Lukas is talking about, either.

"The tree just past the orchard," he explains, but his grandfather shakes his head.

"You know there aren't any trees till you get to the woods."

But there is a tree there; he's seen it — on multiple occasions, too.

_Why doesn't anyone believe me?_

The tree is still there when he finishes eating his meal, seemingly invisible to everyone but him. It's beautiful in a creepy sort of way, with it being the only one of its kind, at least here on the farm.

He sits in front of it, resting his back against its trunk. It doesn't really smell like any tree he's seen before; if anything, it almost smells old — like dust and ash, making his nose twitch.

And then he hears it — the soft thunk as something falls from the tree and onto the rain-stained grass. When he turns to look, it's one of the strange fruits, lying beside him now. It's a long one, roughly the length of his arm and without any particular scent when he sniffs it. The skin of the fruit is soft, and he turns it around in his hands until he finds a strange mark. It's just below an odd curve in the fruit, almost where an elbow would be on a person. The mark is in between two dark spots, so small that, if he wasn't familiar with them, he might not have noticed them.

When he drops the fruit, less than a foot from the ground, it bursts in a grotesque mesh of seeds and reddish insides. Only moments before it had been so firm in his hands, but once it touched the ground, it somehow lost whatever it was holding it together as if it had been waiting for him.

The marks on the fruit looked just like his own arm: the scar from his childhood fall nestled in between two freckles. It's similar enough to frighten him, but he reminds himself that it can't hurt him. It's just fruit, and it's just a tree.

For a moment, he wonders if things might have been different if he never picked it up — if he never dropped such a precious offering bestowed upon him. 

* * *

Lukas hasn't returned by the time his mother decides to head home, so she cups her hands to her mouth and shouts his name outside. Her voice rings out through the expanse of the farm, but all that returns her calls are the wind and soft mooing of the distant cows.

Although his family searches for him — with the police and neighbors called to help later — they never find a sign of Lukas. In the end, the police called off the search, deeming him lost in the woods. Maybe he met his end by a bear or the coyotes known to roam, despite never visiting the woods by himself, but, still, no evidence of that was ever found.

There's just that strange tree growing at the edge of the orchard, its gnarled branches reaching further and further as it stretches across the horizon. Maybe if someone looks closely, they'll discover the fruit it bears, its shape oddly resembling a human arm.

But no one looks. No one sees.


End file.
